Israel is destroying the evidence in the world’s largest crime scenes – Gaza and South Lebanon. Journalist Cathy Peters investigates the push to obliterate Palestinian lives and identity.
Israel is currently creating new Orwellian ‘facts on the ground’ in Gaza. Millions of tonnes of rubble are being transported out of areas in Gaza that the IDF has closed off behind the Yellow Line Zone.
Key locations of recent and former burial sites and ruins of major urban and agricultural landscapes have been razed in a blatant move to erase not only evidence of war crimes but also evidence of prior Palestinian existence on these lands.
Meanwhile, Drop Site News reported journalist Muhammad Shehada has asked Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to disclose whether Gaza reconstruction funds were “paying Israeli contractors or the Israeli military to remove rubble that may contain human remains and pave roads over potential mass graves”. The Board of Peace has denied it.
Nakba reprise
The Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic) of 1948 was planned by a group of Jewish Zionist leaders including Israel’s first president, Ben Gurion, seven years prior to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from Palestine. 530 towns and villages were depopulated, destroyed and then flattened in 1948.
They had been identified in the “Village Files” project (1940–47) which extensively mapped and gathered intelligence on hundreds of towns and villages. These files were incorporated into the ethnic cleansing Plan Dalet of 1948.
By August that year Ben Gurion had formally laid out a policy for the complete erasure of Palestinian existence in large areas of historic Palestine. This razing ensured that Palestinians once forcibly expelled, would not have anything to return to as refugees.
In subsequent years, the Israeli state and state supported organisations like the Jewish National Fund, planted forests over the sites of former Palestinian villages, greenwashing the colonisation of Palestinian lands to ‘dehistoricise Palestine’ in an attempt to obliterate Palestinian identity and ownership of the land.
Facts on the Ground
‘Facts on the ground’ is a familiar catch cry for illegal Israeli actions – unilateral military and civilian actions led by successive generations of Israeli governments pursuing their goal of ‘Eretz Israel’ (The Land of Israel) through relentless seizure of Palestinian property regardless of any agreements or international laws.
The creation of ‘facts on the ground’ such as the 1948 razing of evidence of Palestinian existence throughout Palestine ‘48 (now Israel) or the masses of illegal Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have thwarted any legal processes and greatly
impeded chances for a just peace for Palestinians.
Israel’s latest ‘facts on the ground’ are the large swathes of flattened land throughout closed off areas in Gaza and South Lebanon. It has obliterated all evidence of habitation and destroyed evidence in the world’s largest crime scenes.
As 2 million Palestinians try to survive in unspeakable conditions herded into just over a third of the land mass of Gaza, IOF (Israel Occupying Forces) and their mercenary contractors are destroying physical evidence of Israel’s war crimes and of prior Palestinian existence throughout some 65% of land now closed off in the Yellow Line Zone controlled by Israeli forces.
Bombed out landscapes with any number of human remains, crumbling structures of homes, municipal buildings, mosques, streets, civil infrastructure and vital agricultural lands are being razed.
Al Jazeera has reported that hundreds of trucks are transporting rubble out of the Gaza Strip into Israel. This is another grave violation of international humanitarian law by Israel and an obstruction of the work the International Court of Justice is doing in relation to the case brought by South Africa against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Destroying, altering, or removing evidence can constitute an offence against the administration of justice under Article 70 of the Rome Statute. The Genocide Convention cites that along with killing and inflicting severe bodily or mental harm,
destroying the means of existence for a group, is genocide.
Child in Gaza. Image: X
This week South Africa accused Israel of failing to adhere to the orders imposed by the International Court of Justice in 2024 and filed a dossier to the Court citing that Israel had continued to arbitrarily kill and arrest, torture and imprison Palestinians in Gaza and other violations of the Genocide Convention which include destruction of buildings and infrastructure.
Out of sight, out of mind
There are no peace keepers in Gaza, no Palestinian or international war crimes investigators or journalists and no members of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the body established to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza established by Trump’s Board of Peace and the terms of the ceasefire of October 2025.
They have not yet set foot in Gaza despite the urgent call two weeks ago by the Gaza Government Media Office for them to enter the Strip urgently.
Without any oversight, Israel is creating irreversible facts on the ground and bulldozing not only evidence of its crimes and the bodies of those killed and unaccounted for, but any remaining documentation of individuals’ lives and their ownership of property and land.
Now, not a single landmark or street or tree or building remains in key areas inside the Yellow Line Zone occupied by the IOF and its supported civilian militias outposts.
The BBC produced this forensic satellite analysis of the widespread destruction of towns and cities in Gaza back in July 2025 and all reports indicate that this destruction is continuing apace with the removal of rubble into Israel now a key feature.
Gaza. BBC satellite investigation
Not only is the genocide and continued military blockade in Gaza denying any rights or recourse to justice for the living but this erasure is denying Palestinians the right to identify and bury their dead, and to recover any of their heritage in these areas in Gaza which goes back thousands of years.
Testimonies from Gaza
Michael West Media has received reports from Palestinians on the ground in Gaza.
Ahmed is a graduate of one of the best universities in Gaza. He lost his family and home east of Gaza City early in the genocide, and now lives alone in a damaged apartment in Gaza City. Previously he took shelter in a primary school near his home, but the IDF occupied it and has now cleared its ruins. He speaks frequently with Australian friends.
“The IDF and the pro-Israel militia have been killing people trying to cross the yellow line to try salvage personal possessions from the ruins of their homes. Now all the Israeli-controlled zone is being flattened, with rubble and bodies removed to Israel. This means no one can see where their streets or homes or shops or farms were. Families cannot properly honour their dead.
“Historic buildings and the Commonwealth war cemetery, near my old home, have been bulldozed. Friends being evacuated via the Israeli Karem Abu Salem checkpoint, have said all of the land in Rafah has been
levelled, except for the Israeli and allied militia bases.
“The levelling is not just for unrestricted military operations by Israel, but shows they want to eradicate Palestinian presence from eastern, southern and northern Gaza permanently.
On the Palestinian side of the yellow line, Israel is doing what it can, by controlling what supplies enter and who sells them, and by bombing local police, to encourage internal conflict, for instance between the big families.”
Tarek, the brother of a Palestinian Australian, is unable to get a visa out of Gaza.
“The situation in Gaza is extremely desperate with people struggling to access basic necessities such as food, safe drinking water, shelter, health care, and medicines. Overcrowded tents and poor sanitation have led to a significant spread of rodents, insects, and diseases in shelters and streets.
“At the same time, shortages of medicines and limited access to health services are putting vulnerable patients, particularly those with chronic conditions, at serious risk.”
Tarek’s comments on the bulldozing and removal of rubble from Gaza reinforce reports from EuroMed Monitor and Al Jazeera on what is happening behind the Yellow Line Zone, hidden from sight as Israel creates its facts on the ground now in Gaza.
“I have heard about the extensive bulldozing and destruction of areas behind the so-called yellow line, including the removal of rubble. I am familiar with some of these areas because some of my friends and colleagues used to live there.
“Large parts of these residential areas have been destroyed or heavily damaged, leaving families displaced and unable to return to their homes. The scale of the destruction has resulted in the loss of homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods, making the possibility of returning to normal life increasingly difficult.
“We do not deserve this. The lack of strong action from the international community feels like a profound abandonment and
a great failure toward the people of Gaza.”
Ahmed lives in Sydney and has lost many family members. He is in regular contact with a family survivor in desperate conditions in the Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Yunis city in southern Gaza where many thousands of displaced Palestinians living in tents have been facing acute water shortages and extreme heat for months.
“The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. There’s a renewed blockade of medical supplies and essential food supplies. Clean water has been incredibly scarce and food supplies are becoming more and more limited.
“Dangerous rodents and harmful insects have infested the displacement camps along the coasts of Khan Younis (Al Mawasi area) and residents suspect that to be intentionally spread by the IOF because they are of types that they have never seen in the Strip before.
“Moreover, the burning heat waves this summer have been dangerously paralysing and detrimental especially for newborns, small children, and the injured who have not been able to be evacuated overseas for medical attention.
“The genocide may have slowed down to avert the global attention away from Gaza, but our beloved Gaza Strip has been shrinking, and has evidently become a laboratory for the IOF necropolitics where they get to test all types of
physical, mental and psychological weapons
they continuously develop to suppress the population, as they intentionally keep the gates to the Gaza death camp securely locked.
Razing South Lebanon
Last week the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called for “an end to [Israeli] attacks directed against, or indiscriminately affecting, civilians and civilian objects in Lebanon” and noted “reports that entire villages in southern Lebanon have been rendered uninhabitable, with homes, schools, healthcare facilities, water and electricity infrastructure, places of worship and agricultural land destroyed by strikes and demolitions.”
Since March this year, Israel indiscriminately attacked Lebanon and enforced mass displacement orders particularly throughout Southern Lebanon resulting in 1 million people forcibly displaced from 189 towns and villages in just one week.
The Lebanese public research institute, the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) has estimated that almost 85,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed in the south.
Additionally Israel sprayed what laboratory tests confirmed was glyphosate at very high levels over prime agricultural land destroying the chance of farmers to continue to work their lands.
Human Rights Watch has documented numerous instances of Israel’s illegal use of white phosphorus in populated areas of South Lebanon since 2023.
White phosphorus, blood-red money. Australian Super profiting from genocide
In April this year, BBC Verify assembled data on the destruction in Lebanon based on satellite maps showing the complete razing of towns and villages in the south in line with Defence Minister Katz’s order of March 22nd to “accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes” and key infrastructure
based on the “model in Gaza”.
As quoted in the Lighthouse Report and co published with the Financial Times in August, Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at Amnesty International stated that “It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon … “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”
These are Israel’s facts on the ground in Lebanon.
Israel justifies its actions in Gaza and Lebanon as self-defence but the systematic erasure of life and the means to life has never been about self defence. There will never be any justification for the industrial slaughter and collective punishment in Gaza and Lebanon and the razing of their lands where generations of existence has been wiped off the map.
What ceasefire? People still being killed and Gaza still under siege
Cathy Peters is a former ABC RN producer/executive producer and Greens councillor on the former Marrickville Council. She also worked for a state Greens MP and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights. In 2014, she co-founded PSNA / BDS Australia. She has Jewish heritage, has travelled and volunteered in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.